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RENO, Nev.– It's a long way from Wall Street to the rail tracks on 4th Street in this casino town, but this is where the road is leading for an increasing number of Americans.

Here, in the shadow of the giant casinos which mark the downtown landscape of this northern Nevada gambling mecca, as many as 150 people lived in a tent city until last weekend, one of a number of emergency shanty towns that sprang up in U.S. cities this past summer.

With winter approaching, Reno's tent city was dismantled last weekend, but some homeless are still trying to find shelter.

There are fears many more tent cities will rise next spring as more homes and jobs are lost in this country, a grim sign of the inheritance awaiting a new president, Barack Obama or John McCain.

What stunned officials here was that those in this makeshift shelter, which sprouted almost overnight, were not California migrants bringing their mental health or substance abuse problems to Nevada.

Seven in 10 were from the area, where the housing market has cratered, the tourism industry is in the dumps and construction jobs have disappeared.

These tent cities have been compared to Depression-era Hoovervilles, the shantytowns of the homeless named for the president of the era, Herbert Hoover.

Reno is not alone.

Similar tent cities have sprung up in Seattle, San Diego, Fresno, Calif.; Columbus, Ohio and Chattanooga, Tenn. In Seattle, where as many as 150 homeless persons have been moving around to thwart authorities, they have dubbed their community Nickelsville, named for Mayor Greg Nickels.

"Everyone was drinking or coughing or getting high or talking about getting high.''

Foley is thinking of heading to San Diego, maybe linking up with a brother in North Carolina, in search of work.

"This is a casino town. If you're not hooked up with them, you're dead,'' he says.

On this day, Jessica Seitz, a 29-year-old mother of four, was looking for whatever she could get for her children at a second-hand store near the tent city site.

She and her husband, Matt, moved to Reno from nearby Carson City in May because they could no longer afford the rent and the gas needed for the 30-minute commute.

"We're trying to make it,'' she said as she strapped nine-year-old Alyssa, seven-year-old Cameron, four-year-old Autumn and two-year-old Logan into a borrowed van.

"My husband works his butt off, but he's making $12 an hour in a warehouse. You can't keep going as a family of six on $12 per hour.''

Jodi Royal-Goodwin, Reno's community reinvestment manager, has seen her city become the poster child for the homeless this summer, but she knows she is not alone.

"They (tent cities) are all over the place,'' she says.

"I've heard the comparisons to Hooverville, but we are at 8 per cent unemployment here now. Hooverville was 25 per cent unemployment. Heaven help us all if we do get to that point.''

She says, for now, she believes there are enough shelters to house the homeless during Reno's cold winters.

She has 158 beds for men, another 60 in an overflow shelter.

The city has another 50 beds in a women's shelter and another 102 family beds for those with children who are homeless.

Nearly 61 per cent of local and state homeless coalitions say they've experienced a rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, according to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Patrick O'Bryan has been the head of the Reno police department's crisis intervention program for 20 years. He says he's never seen anything like this.

"Unless some type of miracle happens and we, as Americans, start investing in humans first and other things second, I wouldn't be surprised to be facing this again next spring the way things are going,'' he said.

This state is the country's per capita leader in homelessness. It also ranks with the worst in alcohol abuse – and a city where the bars stay open 24 hours is no place to try to dry out – and suicides.

"Part of this is the long-held expectation that Nevada was somehow to be bomb-proof,'' O'Bryan said. "Historically, we have had a number of entry-level jobs that don't require a great deal of skill.''

But the would-be busboys, cocktail waitresses, landscapers and day labourers are finding there is nothing here any longer.

Between May 2006 and May 2008, says Nevada demographer Jeff Hardcastle, this state shed 15,000 construction jobs alone.

Nevada, like other states, is also finding that homeless Vietnam vets are now joined by homeless veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

"Nevada is getting hammered,'' O'Bryan said. "They're here, it doesn't look good, but we had nowhere to send those people.''

It started with the city providing shade and picnic tables for the homeless during the summer. Then they started staying overnight.

So, in turn for promises of job searches, the city registered the tent city denizens and provided security for them in the parking lot before the tent city was dismantled.

George Stewart, a 43-year-old California native whose downward spiral came after the roofing company at which he worked closed and he could not survive on part-time work, spent a frigid night in a parking lot last weekend. He is trying to put together $122 to get himself and his 38-year-old wife Joyce back to their Redding, Calif., home after spending six weeks in the tent city.

Those still working and have homes are hurting, too.

"Every day it gets just a little slower,'' said Reno cabbie Joe Flatley, 64. He said he's earning $6,000 to $7,000 less this year than he did last year.

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